Strategy for managing files in /etc, suggestions?

[Chris Green]

On Thu, Dec 17, 2020 at 01:41:37AM +0100, Alessandro Dentella wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 16, 2020 at 10:32:23PM +0000, Chris Green wrote:
> > I use mercurial for managing all the little bash and python utilities
> > that I write for my various Linux systems and it's very handy.
> > 
> > I'm thinking that it would be an excellent idea to keep track of
> > changes I do to system configuration files in /etc, I try to keep
> > these to a minimum but some are inevitable.
> > 
> > What's the best way of handling this, changes to very few files in a
> > directory with (probably) thousands of files?  Is it best simply to
> > copy them out to a development area, do changes there and copy them
> > back to /etc?  I'm not entirely happy with this method but I can't
> > really see a better way.  I suppose one could set up a mercurial
> > repository in /etc and have a .hgignore that ignores everything then
> > 'add' files that I'm changing.
> > 
> > Does anyone else do anything like either of the above?  ... or is my
> > OCD getting the better of me! :-)
> 
> I've been keeping track of /etc of all my servers since I started using mercurial
> (maybe 15 years ago?).
> 
> It's definitely very useful! I have a repo in /etc. I commit in a cronjob once a
> day and almost never commit myself. I can tell any single configuration when has
> been set.
> 
> I set the read/write permission so that only root can enter /etc/.hg and I push
> once a day the repo to a central mercurial-server that currently has more than
> 500 configurations. Sometime it's also usefull when you install something and
> want to understand in which way it changes your /configuration.
> 
Another good way, thanks.

-- 
Chris Green